Beyond The Wallow

Standing at the edge of the shallow depression in the dirt–the ghost of a buffalo wallow created who knows how long before we so stupidly wiped them to the brink of extinction–storm clouds boiling in the distance evoke images of vast herds boiling over this hilly terrain.

Today, merely a dip in the grassland, a faint scar on the skin of a wide river valley, the sea of black-hoofed grazers who laid it down have been all but erased. Only dirt remembers to keep sign of their time spent here. It feels like a shallow grave for an entire epoch. The silence is heavy, underscored by the unsettling realization that we are walking through a landscape defined by a profound, maliciously-manufactured absence. A greed-driven crime.

Beyond tangled tree line, the sky refuses to be defeated. Looming over the valley where three rivers converge, colossal clouds rumble—a ghost herd of another kind. It rises like a monument of pure, blinding light against blue, massive and churning with the unseen energy of a coming storm. It's a strangely dark comfort: humanity can strip the prairie, silence the thunder of a million hooves, and flatten the wallows, but it cannot seize and silence the skies.